BC146 - Five Mixes: The Haçienda on Apple Music, 1987-91
Newly available mixes from the legendary Manchester nightclub at the height of British rave
The Haçienda; photo by Peter J. Walsh
This grouping represents a departure for this newsletter. I have certainly written about officially licensed mixes here many times, but this is the first time I’ve delved into the robust Apple Music DJ-set holdings, despite being tempted before many times. But a PR email hyping the fifty-one (!) mixes from The Haçienda forced my hand. Not only is it a gimme, I already did one much like it for Pitchfork a while back, taken primarily from the holdings of Blog 51—The Haçienda.
Nothing in that roundup is part of the Apple Music outlay—eleven sets from the club’s decade as a living entity, plus forty-one more from later parties celebrating it. As you may well imagine, the first part of the equation is the part I care about. This page contains those eleven sets, the first five of which I explore below.
Mike Pickering, via RBMA
Mike Pickering, Jul 1987, Pt. 1
Mike Pickering wasn’t a DJ at all when he began spinning at the Haçienda. It was 1985, his band Quando Quango had been touring off the back of their 12-inch “Love Tempo,” and in New York they played the Paradise Garage and visited the Loft. “I was gobsmacked by it all, because I was just this little scally,” Pickering told Bill Brewster. “So I went back to the Haçienda and I was, ‘This is what it’s got to be like.’” That meant no talking between songs like the radio DJs who performed in British clubs up to that point: “They all wanted to talk, they were all so programmed. So in the end, I just thought I could do better and started doing the Friday night. It was a real mélange of music at first, everything from salsa to electro to northern and it really took off.”
This set shows us that mélange in action—slightly heavier on house than hip-hop, but coequal in a way that would soon disappear. It’s obvious that house music’s rise in the UK was already well underway by this point, from the charts on down. But the idea of house, or acid house, as the soundtrack of its own subcultural nexus was not present in the mind of the British public quite yet, and wouldn’t be until Shoom that December. The mixing isn’t much cop at this point yet, either—though to be fair, relatively few nightclub DJs saw beat-matching as an essential at this point.
Graeme Park and Mike Pickering, 1989, via Pequinos Clasicos Perdidos
Graeme Park b2b Mike Pickering, Aug 4, 1989
Some of these sets are primo period pieces, but this one goes straight in the pantheon—it’s an hour of contagious momentum, abetted by whistles and crowd noise. It moves quickly—twenty-two tracks in sixty minutes. You could write a shadow history of the moment from the un-ID’ed tracks alone. Let’s see: 1) Morse Code piano line and piping synth-trumpet joust merrily. 2) It’s house, but it’s also late freestyle. 3) Growly yelly vocal sample about dancing to the beat over electro-toms and rompy-campy Broadway-disco sample (I think). 4) Sorta pro-forma sampled-title-phrase slaw, but the Todd Terry siren samples offer grist. 5) “Coming off like a hip-house junkie,” scratches galore, name-checks Julian Perez. 6) Previous track, “Ya Bad Chubbs,” comes to a dead needle-stop (whichever DJ just switches the Technics off), and in comes this stutter-keyboard-bass groove with lush percussion, though it too is switched off in favor of the next one, in almost exactly a minute.
Jon Dasilva, via Discogs
Jon Dasilva, Dec 15, 1989, Pt. 1
Jon Dasilva not only DJ’ed at the Haçienda, he wrote about it for Soul Underground, the British Black-music fanzine. “Manchester has never been a place for fads,” Dasilva huffed in a “North West Beat” column in the November 1988 issue, “and as acid house has filtered through to the high street, the tabloids and mecca clubs, the hardcore crowd has increasingly gone deep and garage. Only students fresh from London wave their arms in the air these days!” And while this set from a year later absolutely romps, it’s not really a hand-waver—heavy on winding acid tracks that work their way to a slow lather—but it weaves a heady, era-specific spell. P.S.: If you want to catch up on 1990, I wrote about a Haçienda set from that year by an unknown DJ (cf. BC121).
Hacienda exterior, 2001; via Blog51
Mike Pickering, Dec 6, 1991
Without time-stamps, you don’t always know what point of the night you might be hearing (early? late? middle?) even if you can generally figure. But the way this one opens with the soulful a cappella vocal from Eleanore Mills’ “Mr. Right” situates us pretty close to the top of the hour, it seems safe to guess. What makes it stick isn’t just the very glossy sound of most of these selections, but the way Pickering keeps bringing that a cappella back into the mix, including right at the end, giving it more continuity.
The Haçienda; photo by Peter J. Walsh
Mike Pickering, Dec 14, 1991
Another definitive time-marker—heavy on tracks that define the period, but also, the tracks he plays go on for a while—only eight total are credited. This was one of the many ways house, techno, and related styles were beginning to break into strands that would find individual paths: house records were expanding in length and scope, and the DJs were beginning to let them play out rather than cut them up so damn much (cf. Pickering/Park above). Pickering does a lot of layering, too, but a more relaxed approach is the point here.